Principles Should be Public

True Story

Once upon a time, there was a client who struggled with the Agile process. It’s not that he wasn’t smart and curious, and it’s not that he didn’t want to build a great product in a domain he knew lots about, but he had a thorny problem: because he was successful, and because he was smart, he just wanted to build this new digital product the way he’d successfully built (non-digital) products before: top-down and waterfall. He didn’t want to make decisions about the details. He refused to look at Pivotal Tracker.

He came to us because he’d heard “Pivotal’s the best”, but he didn’t put together that the process—pairing, testing, short feedback loops, collective ownership of the product, writing the smallest possible stories that deliver user-facing value—were the reason we were successful. We tried to educate, we tried to make the case, we tried to explain Agile, but nothing really worked. He didn’t have the patience, and he just wanted to know why we weren’t building a product that was perfect.

Everything Changed

One day, a Pivot on the project printed up the Agile Manifesto and hung it on the wall. That’s it. Nothing else.

Nothing happened the first day.

Nothing happened the second day.

On the third day, the client, of his own volition, pointed to the manifesto and asked a question: “What’s that?”. We started to tell him, and that opened up the conversation. He was smart and inquisitive and curious, and the more he learned about Agile, the more he understood why we insisted on tight feedback loops, small stories, and user feedback.

The moral of the story: post your principles. Make them public. Let everyone see them. Make them a part of the space you inhabit, and it becomes a little easier to make sure they’re present in your practice.

Jonathan Berger is a designer, developer and technologist who has been active in the NYC technology scene since around 2005, helping to organize events like the Agile Experience Design Meetup, the Pivotal Labs Tech Talk series in NY, Startup Weekend, Barcamp, Fashioncamp, and IgniteNYC. He spends his days building software with Pivotal Labs and his nights and weekends working on Market Publique. Prior to that, he earned a Bachelors in Philosophy at Vassar College and a Masters in Media Studies at the New School(where he also spent quite a bit of time at Parson’s Design + Technology program). He has worked as a designer, developer, video editor, animator, and technology consultant for institutions as diverse as Eyebeam, MTV Networks, Yahoo!, Ogilvy, and the American Museum of Natural History.
He speaks about startups and technology at events like the Future of Web Design, O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, New York Tech Meetup, Fashion 2.0 Startup Showcase, Startup Weekend, North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, The Product Group, and others.
He makes it a point of honor to include Comic Sans in every design project.
Find him on twitter, github, flickr, etc. as @jonathanpberger.